Features

The Slip: Eisenhower -- A great band and my good friends.  Their music is highly inventive melodic rock. The Slip inspires and delights me when I hear the new directions that they decide to take.

Ahmad Jamal Trio at The Blue Note in NYC -- The interplay that this long running trio has is stunning.  The best of improvised music, they have beautiful arrangements but plenty of spontaneous moments of pure abandon and a telepathic understanding of each other.

Playing with JFJO at the Berlin Jazz Fest. It felt great to play for an enthusiastic audience at the kind of festival we have wanted to play for a long time.  Hard work and perseverance pay off, but not always on the schedule that we think it should.

Ray Charles: Best of the Atlantic Years - Ray is an artist who covers such a wide range of expression.  Always grooving with very interesting twists and turns in the harmony and vocals.  Saying a lot emotionally with  simplicity is something I aspire to do when writing music.

Touch the Sound (Evelyn Glennie/percussionist documentary) -- Evelyn Glennie is a Scottish born percussionist that went deaf around her early teens.  She has a unique way that she learned to feel the vibration of pitches and sonic textures.  She is inspirational because many people said she couldn't make music if she was going deaf but she didn't let that stop her.  The range of music and textures that she creates is astounding. The level of sensitivity that it takes to feel and recreate notes so that they are on pitch is masterful.